ABSTRACT
Freedom and worldliness can serve as the terms that stand for what Hannah Arendt prizes most. For Arendt, animal laborans triumphs for the first time in modern times. Arendt writes as if the thought and practice of antiquity and, indeed, of Europe until the modern age, in regard to the hidden, is properly human. Human plurality is the basic condition of action. Arendt says that plurality has a twofold character, equality and distinction. The basic stuff which Arendt, the philosopher, will work over is the nonphilosophical literature of Greece and Rome. Arendt will recover its “treasure.” Some of the most ferocious pages in Arendt are written in denunciation of the decadence of the ancien regime. As for the equalitarian element of human plurality, Arendt invokes the Greek term, isonomy, and reads it to mean not equality of condition, but a condition that makes men equal.
